This invention relates to food manufacture, and in particular to apparatus for manufacturing food items in a continuous bundle and packaging that food in sections or packets.
Cotton candy, or more properly spun sugar candy, has long been a favorite confection at carnivals, amusements parks, and the like. Conventionally, sugar is melted and extruded from a spinning extrusion head, the spun sugar then being collected from a stationary dish surrounding the extrusion head and wound on a stick or paper cone. The inherent tackiness of the freshly extruded strands of spun sugar causes them to stick together in a loose mass resembling cotton batting.
Prior to the 1970s, however, cotton candy had not been successfully made and marketed for widespread distribution and later consumption. The main reason for this lack of success was that there were not sufficiently efficient machines for the automatic manufacture and packaging thereof. And because cotton candy is extremely lightweight, portions of it tend to float upward with air currents in the surrounding atmosphere. It was thus important to minimize human involvement with the apparatus, thus requiring essentially fully automatic production machinery.
A first attempt at such fully automatic cotton candy production machinery is shown in Warning, U.S. Pat. No. 3,930,043. This patent showed rotating pans surrounding the sugar extruders, with the cotton candy strands being pulled out of the pans and fed through a conveyor, where it was cut into sections. The sections were later individually packaged, so that they could be sold at some future date. While this device worked well, there was still room for improvement. Particularly, the rotating star blade cutter disclosed therein became filled with the sticky product, and in any case it was impossible to reliably maintain synchronization or adjustment of the star blade cutter and the cut sections of cotton candy with respect to the packaging machinery.
This invention relates to improvements to the apparatus set forth above, and solutions to some of the problems raised or not solved thereby.